Diary Of A Cataclysm

Have you noticed the spate of end-of-the-world scenario TV movies in the last two months. Asteroids on NBC and ABC, Earth 2100 climate change cartoon on ABC. Then there's that movie (2012?) I've only seen the trailer for where the monk is running to ring the bell for the tidal wave is coming. Did you know there are people who believe the Earth will be hit by a planet in 2012? Its called Nibiru, the planet that is going to hit the Earth. Chiliastic beliefs at their best! How I do love living at the turn of a millennium. Sometimes I wonder, just wondering now, if all our environmental fears are a secular version of this chiliasm.

So, after looking at that funky stuff, enjoy so much this trailer mashup for that movie, 2012. Love the music!

When I was in my last year of undergraduate school I took it upon myself to read the dry biologist and scribe Barry Commoner's Making Peace With the Planet (review). In it, in essence, he describes a world in which all economic activity and warfare expenditure must cease. These resources must then be folded into the environmental problems we are facing. It was 1991.

I stumbled across this article by Derrick Jensen in Orion Magazine. Its called Forget Shorter Showers. Read it, as it is brief, then move on to the 250 comments, which are just as, or more, enlightening on a population torn asunder by humanity's pathological drift toward agriculture and technology.

Here are the things I've given up this year, because they mostly save me money -not sure they save the earth.

• Pump soap -I'm back to bars, pricier ones seem to last months at my bathroom sink.
• The window air conditioner -its been cool enough.
• Not composting -so now I do it, hard to believe.
• Urge to buy used clunker-car -I rent one when I need one.
• Buy beautiful, flat TV -yeah the old one's big and not so well resolved, but who cares.
• Takeout for dinner at work -yup, bringing in the dinner has not only saved me $, lost 15 lbs. in 9 months.
• Bottled water -I can't believe how much I drank! I lobbied for a water fountain at work.

I already vegetable garden, which I know was saving the world for at least 6 months this year. So, you know I couldn't count that one. We did the compact fluorescent thing last year. Um, what else? Running out of things here. MMMM, uuuhhh. So read that article if your having trouble giving stuff up because maybe you're not so sure there's anything left to give up. Maybe there's something else you can do. Besides, who wants to be the only person on the block who can't refrigerate their leftovers from the block party because they gave up the fridge to save the Earth?